CB18 About Face (2009)

by Donna Leon

  ‘No. I’ve already asked Signorina Elettra to see what she can find.’ Then, vaguely, knowing how many times he had used this excuse, ‘Something else came up. But she might have something by tomorrow.’ It took some time before he asked, ‘Does your mother say much about them?’

  ‘Either of them?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I know that he was very eager to divorce his first wife.’ Her voice was a study in neutrality.

  ‘How long ago was that?’

  ‘More than ten years. He was over sixty.’ Brunetti hought Paola had finished, but after a pause that might have been deliberate, she continued, ‘and she was barely thirty.’

  ‘Ah,’ he contented himself with saying.

  Before he devised a way to ask about Franca Marinello, Paola said, reverting to the original subject, ‘My father doesn’t tell me about his business involvements, but he’s interested in China, and I think he sees this as a possibility.’

  Brunetti decided to avoid a second round of discussion of the ethics of investing in China. ‘And Cataldo?’ he asked. ‘What does your father say about him?’

  She patted his thigh in an entirely friendly way, as if Franca Marinello had disappeared from the room. ‘Not much, at least not to me. They’ve known one another for a long time, but I don’t think they’ve ever worked together on anything. I don’t think there’s much love lost between them, but this is business,’ she said, sounding almost too much like her father’s child.

  ‘Thanks,’ Brunetti said.

  Paola leaned forward and picked up the cups. She got to her feet and looked down at him. ‘Time for you to pick up your broom and get back to the Augean Stables.’

  7

  Back at the stables, things were reasonably quiet. Another of the commissari came in after four to complain about Lieutenant Scarpa, who was refusing to turn over some files relating to a two-year-old murder in San Leonardo. ‘I can’t figure out why he’s doing this,’ said Claudia Griffoni, who had been at the Questura only six months and thus was not yet fully acquainted with the Lieutenant and his ways.

  Though she was Neapolitan, her appearance defied every racial stereotype: she was a tall, willowy blonde with blue eyes and skin so clear that she had to be careful of the sun. She could have posed on a poster for a Nordic cruise, though, had she actually worked on the ship, her doctorate in oceanography would have qualified her for a position more exacting than that of hostess. As would the uniform she was wearing in Brunetti’s office, one of three she had had tailored to celebrate her promotion to commissario. She sat across from him, straight in her chair, long legs crossed. He studied the cut of the jacket, short and tight fitting, with hand-stitching along the lapels. The trousers, after a length that delighted Brunetti, were cut tight at the ankle.

  ‘Is it because he wasn’t given the case, so he wants to slow us all down and make it even harder to find the killer?’ Griffoni asked. ‘Or is it something personal between him and me that I don’t know about? Or does he just not like women? Or women police?’

  ‘Or women police who outrank him?’ Brunetti tossed into the pot, curious to see how she would react but also convinced that this was the reason for Scarpa’s constant attempts to undermine her authority.

  ‘Oh, sweet Jesus,’ she exclaimed, tilting her head back, as if to address the ceiling. ‘It’s not enough that I have to put up with this from killers and rapists. Now I’ve got to deal with it from the people I work with.’

  Curious, Brunetti said, ‘I doubt it’s the first time.’ He wondered how Signorina Elettra would respond to the quality of tailoring on the uniform.

  She returned her attention to Brunetti and said, ‘We all get a fair bit of it.’

  ‘What do you do when it happens?’ Brunetti asked.

  ‘Some of us try to flirt our way out of it. You’ve seen it, I’m sure. You ask them to come along to help defuse a domestic argument, and they act like you’ve asked them for a date.’

  Brunetti had indeed seen some of this.

  ‘Or else we get tough and try to be more vulgar and violent than the men.’

  Brunetti nodded in recognition. When she failed to provide a third category, Brunetti asked, ‘Or?’

  ‘Or we don’t let it make us crazy and just try to do our jobs.’

  ‘And if nothing works?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, I suppose we could shoot the bastards.’

  Brunetti laughed out loud. In the time he had known her, he had never tried to suggest how she might deal with Scarpa: indeed, he was reluctant, ever, to give this kind of advice. He had learned over the years that most professional and social situations were pretty much like water on uneven ground: sooner or later, they would work themselves level. People, over time, generally decided who was the Alpha and who the Beta. Higher rank sometimes helped with the determination, but not always. In the end, he had little doubt that Commissario Griffoni would learn how to control Lieutenant Scarpa, but he was equally certain that the Lieutenant would find a way to make her pay for it.

  ‘He’s been here as long as the Vice-Questore, hasn’t he?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. They came together.’

  ‘I suppose I shouldn’t say this, but I’ve always been suspicious of Sicilians,’ she said. Claudia Griffoni, like many upper-class Neapolitans, had been raised speaking Italian, rather than dialect, though she had picked it up from friends and at school and would occasionally use Neapolitan expressions. But they were always spoken within ironic quotation marks, set linguistically apart from the Italian that she spoke as elegantly as Brunetti had ever heard it spoken. Someone who did not know her would therefore believe that her suspicion of Southerners came from the mouth of a person from the North, certainly from someone who lived above Florence.

  Brunetti was aware that she had offered him the remark as a test: if he agreed with her, she could place him in one category; if he disagreed, then she could put him in another. Because he belonged in neither – or in both – Brunetti chose to respond by asking, ‘Does this mean you’ll be joining the Lega next?’

  This time it was she who laughed out loud. When she stopped, she asked, as if she had not noticed his refusal to take the bait, ‘Does he have any friends here?’

  ‘He was working for a time with Alvise on some sort of special European project, but the funds were cut before they did much of anything and before anyone could get an idea of what they were even supposed to be doing.’ Brunetti thought for a while before adding, ‘As to friends, I’m not sure. There’s very little that seems to be known about him. I do know that he chooses not to socialize with anyone here.’

  ‘It’s not as if you Venetians were the most hospitable people in the world,’ she said, smiling to defuse the remark.

  Brunetti was surprised into saying, far more defensively than intended, ‘Not everyone here is Venetian.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ she said, raising a hand in a placatory gesture. ‘Everyone’s very nice and very friendly, but it ends at the door, when we leave to go home.’

  Had he not been a married man, Brunetti would have risen to the situation and invited her to dinner on the spot, but those days were gone, and Paola’s response to his behaviour with Franca Marinello was sufficiently fresh in his memory to keep him from inviting this very attractive woman anywhere.

  Brunetti’s uncertainty was cut short by the arrival of Vianello. ‘Ah, there you are,’ he said, speaking to Brunetti but acknowledging the woman’s presence with a nod and a gesture that, in some other lifetime, might have been a salute.

  He came halfway to Brunetti’s desk and stopped. ‘I saw Signorina Elettra when I came in,’ the Inspector said, ‘and she asked me to tell you she’s spoken to the doctors in San Marcuola and will be up soon to tell you about it.’ When Brunetti nodded his thanks, the Inspector added, ‘The men downstairs told me you’d spoken to them.’ His message delivered, Vianello planted his feet and folded his arms, giving every indication that he had no plans to leave his superi
or’s office until the meaning of his message had been revealed to him.

  Griffoni’s curiosity was just as easily read, and it forced Brunetti to wave Vianello to a seat. ‘I had a Carabiniere here this morning,’ he began, and told them about Guarino’s visit, Ranzato’s murder, and the man who lived near San Marcuola.

  The other officers sat quietly for some time until finally Griffoni said fiercely, ‘For God’s sake, don’t we have enough trouble with our own garbage? Now they’re bringing it in from other countries, too?’

  Both men were stunned by her outburst: Griffoni was usually calm in the face of talk of criminal behaviour. The silence lengthened until she said in an entirely different voice, ‘Two cousins of mine died of cancer last year. One of them was three years younger than I am. Grazia lived less than a kilometre from the incinerator in Taranto.’

  Brunetti said, voice careful, ‘I’m sorry.’

  She raised a hand, then said, ‘I worked on it before I came up here. You can’t work in Naples and not know about garbage. It piles up in the streets, or we go chasing after illegal dumps: everywhere you look in the countryside around Naples, there’s garbage.’

  Speaking directly to her, Vianello said, ‘I’ve read about Taranto. I’ve seen photos of the sheep in the fields.’

  ‘They die of cancer, too, it seems,’ Griffoni said in her usual voice. As Brunetti watched, she shook her head, glanced towards him, and asked, ‘Do we follow this, or does it belong to the Carabinieri?’

  ‘Officially, it does,’ Brunetti answered. ‘But if we’re looking for this man, then we’re involved, too.’

  ‘Does the Vice-Questore have to authorize it?’ Griffoni asked in a neutral voice.

  Before Brunetti could answer, Signorina Elettra came into the office. She greeted Brunetti, smiled at Vianello, and nodded to Griffoni. Brunetti was put in mind of one of Dickens’s characters often mentioned by Paola who would assess a situation in terms of ‘where the wind was coming from’. The north, Brunetti suspected.

  ‘I’ve spoken to one of the doctors there, Commissario,’ she said with exaggerated formality. ‘But he can’t think of anyone. He said he’d ask his colleague when he comes in.’ How fortunate, he thought, that in all these years they had never abandoned using the formal Lei with one another: it served perfectly for this very cool exchange.

  ‘Thank you, Signorina. Let me know what he tells you, would you?’ Brunetti said.

  She looked at the three of them in turn, then added, ‘Certainly, Commissario. I hope there’s nothing I’ve over-looked.’ She glanced at Commissario Griffoni, as if daring her to address herself to that possibility.

  ‘Thank you, Signorina,’ Brunetti said. He smiled, glanced down at the new calendar on his desk and listened for, and then to, the sound of her footsteps heading towards the door, and to the sound of its closing.

  He looked up just late enough to avoid complicity in the glance that passed between Griffoni and Vianello. Griffoni got to her feet, saying, ‘I think I’ll go back to the airport.’ Before either could ask, she said, ‘The case, not the place.’

  ‘The baggage handlers?’ Brunetti, who had been in charge of the previous investigations, asked with a tired sigh.

  ‘Questioning the baggage handlers is like hearing Elvis’s Greatest Hits: you’ve listened to them all a thousand times, sung in different ways and sung by different people, and you never want to hear them again,’ she said tiredly. She went to the door, where she turned back to them and added, ‘But you know you will.’

  When she was gone, Brunetti realized how the day, spent listening to people tell him things while he actually did very little, had tired him. He told Vianello that it was late and suggested they go home. Vianello, though he looked at his watch first, got to his feet and said it sounded like an excellent idea. When the Ispettore was gone, Brunetti decided to stop in the officers’ squad room to use the computer before he went home, just to see how much he could find on his own about Cataldo. The men were accustomed to these visits and saw to it that one of the younger officers stayed in the room while the Commissario was there. This time, however, things proved easy enough, and he soon had a number of links to newspaper and magazine articles.

  Few of them told him more than had the Conte. In an old issue of Chi, he found a photo of Cataldo arm in arm with Franca Marinello before their marriage. They appeared to be on a terrace or balcony, posed with their backs to the sea: Cataldo was broad and serious in a light grey linen suit. She wore white slacks and a short-sleeved black T-shirt and looked very happy. The definition of the screen was enough to show Brunetti how lovely she had been: perhaps in her late-twenties, blonde, taller than her future husband. Her face looked – Brunetti had to think a moment before the right word came to him – it looked uncomplicated. Her smile was modest, her features regular, her eyes blue as the sea behind them. ‘Pretty girl,’ he said under his breath. He touched a key to move the article down to read further, and the screen went blank.

  That did it: he had to have his own computer. He got up, told the nearest man that something was wrong with the machine, and went home.

  8

  The next morning, Brunetti used his office phone to call the Carabinieri in Marghera, only to be told that Maggior Guarino was not there and was not expected until the end of the week. Brunetti pushed aside the thought of Guarino and returned to the idea of getting his own computer. If he did get it, could he continue to expect Signorina Elettra to find the unfindable? Would she then expect him to do basic things, like . . . like find telephone numbers and check vaporetto timetables? Once he could do that, she would probably assume he could easily find the health records of suspects or trace bank transfers into and out of numbered accounts. Still, once he had it, as well as begin to search for information, he would be able more easily to read newspapers on line: current issues, back issues, any issues he chose. But then what of the feel of the Gazzettino in his hand, that dry smell, the black streaks it left against the right-hand pocket of all of his jackets?

  And what, his conscience forced him to confess, of that gentle surge of pride when he opened his copy on the vaporetto and thus declared his citizenship in this quiet city world? Who in their right mind but a Venetian would read the Gazzettino?‘I l Giornale delle Serve’. All right, so it was the newspaper of the servant girls. So what? The national papers were often just as badly written, filled with inaccuracies and sentence fragments and wrongly captioned photos.

  Signorina Elettra chose this moment to appear at the door of his office. He looked across at her and said, ‘I love the Gazzettino.’

  ‘There’s always Palazzo Boldù, Dottore,’ she said, naming the local psychiatric centre. ‘And perhaps some rest, and certainly no reading.’

  ‘Thank you, Signorina,’ he said politely, and then to business, having had the night to think about it – ‘I would like to have a computer here in the office.’

  This time she made no attempt to disguise her reaction. ‘You?’ she asked. ‘Sir,’ she thought to add.

  ‘Yes. One of those flat ones like the one you have.’

  This explanation gave her some time to consider the request. ‘I’m afraid they’re terribly expensive, sir,’ she protested.

  ‘I’m sure they are,’ he answered. ‘But I’m sure there is some way it could be paid for out of the budget for office supplies.’ The more he talked and thought about it, the more he wanted a computer, and one like hers, not that decrepit thing that the officers downstairs had to make do with.

  ‘If you don’t mind, Commissario, I’d like to have a few days to consider this. And see if I can find a way to arrange it.’

  Brunetti sensed victory in her accommodating tone.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, smiling, expansive now. ‘What was it you wanted?’

  ‘It’s about Signor Cataldo,’ she said, holding up a blue manila folder.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ he said, waving her forward and half rising in his chair. ‘What have you found?’ He sai
d nothing about his own attempts at research.

  ‘Well, sir,’ she said, approaching the chair. With a practised gesture, she swept her skirt to one side as she sat. She placed the unopened file on his desk and said, ‘He’s very wealthy, but you must know that already.’ Brunetti suspected everyone in the city knew it, but he nodded to encourage her to continue. ‘He inherited a fortune from his father, who died before Cataldo was forty. That’s more than thirty years ago, just in the middle of the boom. He used it to invest and expand.’

  ‘In what?’ he asked.

  She slid the file back towards her and opened it. ‘He has a factory up near Longarone that makes wooden panels. There are only two in Europe, apparently, that make these things. And a cement factory in the same area. They’re gradually chipping away at a mountain and turning it into cement. In Trieste he’s got a fleet of cargo ships; and a trucking line that does national and international shipping. An agency that sells bulldozers and heavy moving equipment, also dredges. Cranes.’ When Brunetti said nothing, she added, ‘All I’ve got, really, is a list of the companies he owns: I haven’t begun to take a closer look at their finances.’

  Brunetti held up his right hand. ‘Only if its not too difficult, Signorina.’ When she grinned at the unlikelyhood of this, he went on, ‘And here in the city?‘

  She turned over a page, then said, ‘He owns four shops in Calle dei Fabbri and two buildings on Strada Nuova. Those are rented to two restaurants, and there are four apartments above them.’

  ‘Is everything rented?’

  ‘Indeed. One of the shops changed hands a year ago, and the rumour is that the new owner had to pay a buonuscita of a quarter of a million Euros.’

  ‘Just to get the keys?’

  ‘Yes. And the rent is ten thousand.’

  ‘A month?’ Brunetti demanded.

  ‘It’s in the Calle dei Fabbri, sir, and it’s on two floors,’ she said, managing to sound faintly offended that he should question the price – or her accuracy. She closed the file and sat back in her chair.